eclipse 3.0
 
Press release

Eclipse 3.0 Delivers Universal Platform for
Application Construction

  • Expands Support for Award Winning Java Tools Integration
  • New User Interface Integration Helps Tool Providers Migrate Swing-Based Offerings to Eclipse
  • CDT and Hyades Projects Enhance Capabilities

OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA - June 21, 2004 - Today the Eclipse Foundation announced general availability of the royalty-free 3.0 release of the Eclipse Platform, adding enhancements that improve flexibility, scalability, interoperability and responsiveness. Eclipse is an award-winning universal platform for tools integration, software modeling and testing that has been broadly adopted by commercial vendors, academic institutions and open technology developers. With release 3.0, Eclipse now extends its sophisticated object-oriented development technologies to support a rich-client platform (RCP) that enables construction of desktop applications.

"Eclipse has come a long way in its short history. It has done well to attract a steady, but rapidly growing following from many organizations who want a quality backed development platform that has broad and unifying support within the software industry," said Bola Rotibi, senior analyst of Software Development at Ovum. "These timely new enhancements demonstrate the commitment the organization has to providing an effective, scalable and open-sourced development environment-not only for Java J2EE, but also encompassing other language environments, notably C/C++. Clearly, any enhancements to the power and flexibility of the environment will be a bonus to those committed, to or looking to commit, to Eclipse."

Eclipse 3.0 is the cumulative result of 15 months of project investment by supporting members and the Eclipse community, continuing the commitment to implement open technology built upon established industry standards. Enhancements such as the following have been made to core facilities to help make Eclipse use more convenient, consistent and responsive:

  • Enhanced the end user's 'out-of-the-box' experience
  • Streamlined installation for functionally powerful features with reduced complexity
  • Improved customization of menus and toolbars
  • Added new role and experience-based approaches for managing workbench features and facilities
  • Restructured the workbench to allow running underlying program facilities in the background in a multi-threaded environment.

"Eclipse 3.0 brings new features which will delight plug-in and application developers that rely on this advanced platform," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "Thanks to community support only possible in an open environment, Eclipse 3.0 quality benefits from the skill and continuous evaluation of a large number of industry professionals worldwide."

Concurrent with this new release, the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) project and the Hyades application verification and optimization project are shipping new versions.

Eclipse was originally conceived as a universal platform for tools integration. Experience and feedback from users made it clear that Eclipse was also ideally suited for the construction of functionally-rich desktop applications. Features and facets that have been used as the core of Eclipse's sophisticated object-oriented development technologies have been restructured and repackaged in 3.0, making Eclipse an open, extensible platform for application construction and integration. This includes Eclipse's window-based workbench GUI, the dynamic plug-in functional extension mechanism, help subsystem and update manager.

When Java applications are constructed with Eclipse's Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and deployed to different operating platforms, they adopt native window manager look and feel. On Linux Motif or the GTK, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Photon, AIX, HP/UX platforms, and other supported platforms, Eclipse users can develop applications in Java with the true look-and-feel of the platform.

When used on the Linux and Windows platforms, Eclipse 3.0 adds the ability to embed Swing widgets in SWT-based user interfaces. This allows integration of Swing-based applications and tools within the Eclipse workbench and other functionally-rich applications. New features allow Eclipse plug-in providers to customize user interfaces and establish a branded appearance for products and applications.

The Java Development Tools (JDT) project has improved the user experiences of reading, writing and navigating source code, adding improved refactoring, code formatting and editor features such as code folding. JDT has been generalized to enable tools that support Java-related languages like SQLj and JSPs. This includes implementation of the Java Community Process JSR45 standard for debugging. JDT also now embraces non-language files like manifests and J2EE deployment descriptors that reference Java language elements.

Eclipse was adapted to add support for the OSGi (www.osgi.org) framework specification when constructing functionally extensible applications. This open standard for plug-in extensions supports installation and dynamic activation under program control, permitting fine-grain conservation of resources like memory in complex integrated tools and client environments. In addition, the Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment now supports component integration for platforms that incorporate very large numbers of plug-ins.

CDT and Hyades Project Updates

Other Eclipse-hosted open projects have coordinated their distributions with the 3.0 launch. These include extensions to the C/C++ Development Tools and the Hyades Project's implementation of the recently approved OMG U2TP Test Profile standard.

The C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) offer numerous enhancements to provide a faster, more productive user experience. To simplify code editing and navigation, the tools now include improved string searches, configurable code completion, a C/C++ class browser and a refactoring facility for automating code changes across an entire project. To speed application debugging, the debugger now presents both source code and assembly in the same view. To free developers from writing and maintaining makefiles, the CDT environment now includes a "managed build" feature.

In addition, the CDT leverages the new multi-threading support in Eclipse 3.0. As a result, operations such as indexing and building can now run in the background, allowing the developer to continue working on other tasks.

Other new features include improved interfacing with modeling tools, support for national languages through I18N-style internationalization and new API documentation that makes it easier for tool providers to incorporate CDT technology into their offerings.

Hyades 3.0 provides an integration framework and extensible core tools for application verification and optimization. Technology in the framework includes testing, tracing, profiling, logging and monitoring application systems. This project extends Eclipse to span the entire project lifecycle from development and deployment through production and monitoring. Hyades includes an Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)-based implementation of data models for trace, log, statistical data, test execution history and tests as well as sample test execution engines for JUnit, HTTP URL and manual testing environments; statistical performance data collection agents for Microsoft environments; Apache log collection agents; Java trace agents and Java probe insertion kits. An integrated extensible framework of generic interoperable data model editors and viewers is also provided.

Availability

Distributions of Eclipse 3.0 will be available by June 30 for download from http://www.eclipse.org.

About Eclipse

The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit member-supported corporation that hosts community based open projects. Eclipse creates royalty-free technology and a universal platform for development tools integration, modeling, testing and functionally-rich application construction. Eclipse based offerings give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor supported environment. Eclipse delivers a dynamic plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create and integrate technology, saving time and money. By collaborating and sharing core integration technology, technology providers can concentrate and focus on areas of expertise and differentiation. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux, QNX, Mac OS X and Windows-based systems. Full details of the Eclipse Foundation and white papers documenting the design of the Eclipse Platform are available at www.eclipse.org.http://www.eclipse.org.

 
From the eclipse community

IBM - Lee Nackman, vice president, Desktop Development Tools and CTO Rational Software, IBM Software Group
"We are very excited about the many benefits that Eclipse 3.0 will bring to our customers and are proud of the leading role IBM developers have had in bringing it to the industry. IBM is now working towards a release of Eclipse 3.0-based products of our market-leading Rational tools and Lotus collaboration solutions."

Intel - Jonathan Khazam, General Manager of Intel Software Development Products
"Eclipse 3.0 brings significant new features and functionality to the Eclipse ecosystem. Intel is actively developing versions of Intel Compilers and VTune Performance Analyzers with Eclipse integration for Linux. Intel is also taking an active role in Eclipse projects such as Hyades and looks forward to continued involvement with the Eclipse community."

Exadel - Fima Katz, president and CEO
"Exadel is excited about the new 3.0 Eclipse Platform for delivering its own Professional Tools for Open Source. The improved built-in Java IDE and user interface deliver enhanced value to our customers while the greatly improved Eclipse plug-in development environment makes it much easier for us to serve our customers better by expediting the process of improving our existing tools and creating new ones."

Genuitec - Maher Masri, president
"Eclipse provides a phenomenal platform for building world-class development tools and lowers the barriers for companies and individuals to enter new markets and offer competitive products. Eclipse 3.0 extends the platform for developing rich-client applications and reclaims Java as an effective solution for the desktop."

Instantiations Inc. - Michael Taylor, CEO
"The new Eclipse 3.0 release is a major step forward for the industry. As an enterprise software tools provider and Eclipse foundation member, Instantiations is fully supporting Eclipse 3.0. Our strategic products, CodePro Studio and WindowBuilder Pro, are ready to run on Eclipse 3.0 today. Our customers will be assured that they will have the most robust and productive tool-sets to use in creating enterprise-scale Java applications and rich-client user interfaces."

INNOOPRACT - Jochen Krause, president
"Eclipse 3.0 has been eagerly awaited by INNOOPRACT and our customers. The additional improvements such as the new welcome, the help system, the refactoring API as well as dozens more improvements serve to cement Eclipse as the leading development platform. Our W4T Eclipse plug-in will leverage these benefits to enhance the web development capabilities for Eclipse users."

Kinzan - Garland Wong, president
"We believe that this new release further solidifies Eclipse's reputation as the most powerful and extensible IDE for Java development and we will be updating Kinzan Studio, our plug-in for rapidly assembling flexible web applications, to take full advantage of its new capabilities."

Novell - Chris Cooper, Director of Developer Services
"Eclipse is central to Novell's Developer Tools strategy. With version 3.0 developers enjoy the same robust features for native C/C++ on Linux that they've enjoyed for Java development. Novell will ship Eclipse 3.0 with SUSE LINUX server and desktop offerings. Eclipse continues to be a key component to Novell's strategy to grow the Linux developer community and bring mainstream developers to the platform. Novell is also leveraging the Eclipse Platform to deliver next-generation developer tools for our identity management, portal and web application development offerings."

Scapa Technologies - Michael Norman, CEO
"Scapa Technologies has made a substantial contribution to the Eclipse 3.0 code base, in particular in the test, performance analysis and monitoring tools area, through its development of the Hyades StatCon (statistical console) module and Perfmon agent. We see these as major features in Eclipse 3.0 and also as integration points that we will leverage to add significant value to future releases of our performance analysis solutions."

Serena Software - Boris Kapitanski, Vice President of Strategic Technology
"As a founding member of Eclipse, Serena Software is enthusiastic about the latest release of Eclipse 3.0. With Serena's integrated Enterprise Change Management suite and the flexibility, scalability and responsiveness improvements in Eclipse 3.0, we will be able to offer a solution to manage and control application development that is more reliable and efficient in delivering quality applications."

SlickEdit - Bob Bradley, vice president of Sales and Business Development
"SlickEdit remains dedicated to supporting Eclipse and is very excited about the advancements Eclipse 3.0 will provide to the developer community. The Visual SlickEdit plug-in for Eclipse 3.0 will be generally available for sale in late July and will continue to be a best-in-class editor plug-in by incorporating many new advanced editing features, enabling Eclipse developers to write more code faster and more accurately."

Tensilica - Chris Songer, director of platform engineering
"CDT quality and features have been on a tremendous growth curve. The 3.0 release is going to be outstanding and we are already committed to basing a future version of Xtensa Xplorer on it."

Media contact

Barbara Stewart
Patterson & Associates
480-488-6909
barbara@patterson.com


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